Tag: books and reading

George R. R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and other famous writers join Authors Guild in class action lawsuit against OpenAI
Technology

George R. R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and other famous writers join Authors Guild in class action lawsuit against OpenAI

New York CNN  —  A group of famous fiction writers joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action suit against OpenAI on Wednesday, alleging the company’s technology is illegally using their copyrighted work. The complaint claims that OpenAI, the company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, is copying famous works in acts of “flagrant and harmful” copyright infringement and feeding manuscripts into algorithms to help train systems on how to create more human-like text responses. George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen are among the 17 prominent authors who joined the suit led by the Authors Guild, a professional organization that protects writers’ rights. Filed in the Souther...
Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk
Technology

Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk

CNN  —  “You’ll never be successful,” Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education. That’s one of the scenes Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who ever lived. The biography allows readers new glimpses into the private life of the entrepreneur who popularized electric vehicles for the masses and landed rocket boosters hurtling back to Earth so they could be reused. But Musk’s public statements and actions have become increasingly unhinged, filing and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that fight hate speech and allowing some of the in...
An author says AI is ‘writing’ unauthorized books being sold under her name on Amazon
Technology

An author says AI is ‘writing’ unauthorized books being sold under her name on Amazon

New York CNN  —  An author is raising alarms this week after she found new books being sold on Amazon under her name — only she didn’t write them; they appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence. Jane Friedman, who has authored multiple books and consulted about working in the writing and publishing industry, told CNN that an eagle-eyed reader looking for more of her work bought one of the fake titles on Amazon. The books had titles similar to the subjects she typically writes about, but the text read as if someone had used a generative AI model to imitate her style. “When I started looking at these books, looking at the opening pages, looking at the bio, it was just obvious to me th...